Full Metal 8 Bay 2.5 Inche HDD SDD Tray Less Mobile Rack SATA or Mini SAS Interface for 5.25" Drive Bay SY-MRA25052

This is likely the best built multi-full-height-2.5" drive mounting solution on Amazon. There are others, if you're using nothing but SSDs, but at the price of SAS SSDs versus spinning rust SAS drives, as well as the diminishing redundancy caused by larger capacity drives, this makes a perfect solution for a decent RAID enclosure for one's desktop tower computer. Much less expensive than even many of the 8-drive SAS enclosures meant for smaller SSDs, and made of mostly metal construction versus the other ones out there. Throw in eight enterprise SAS drives of modest (~1.5-2TB) size and you've got a great solution for a RAID 5+0, 6+0 or 1+0 ultra-reliable or ultra-fast large-ish storage bin. Offload all those important files to a 10 or 20TB external drive that you take to off-site locations and you're pretty much covered for data integrity. As you grow and upgrade (who wants to spend $500+ each - that's $4000!!! - on eight 8TB SSDs today?) to large SSDs at a later date when they become more affordable, this enclosure will still work. One can have quite a large, reliable, fast storage bin with eight 4-8TB SSDs - all of which this hardware will accommodate. So far, so good, it looks nice and stays cool. If it continues to work well, I will grab a SAS extender and another one of these enclosures in the near future, as my old tower case has room for exactly one more.

I popped it in, set the two used SATA ports to be hot-pluggable in the UEFI, and everything was good to go. I could've used a SATA dock years ago but I've always been so short on desk space and spare USB ports that it never became a high priority to get a more common external USB dock. I was looking for a dock like this one a few months ago but everything was built cheap and crappy and I didn't want any broken drive doors or anything like that. This one seems to be made to last. I love that it has functional activity lights for both drives tooMy only issue: I kind of wish they made a version without USB, maybe an SD card reader instead or something along those lines. My case already happened to come with two USB 3.0 ports on the front and they're already connected to the only USB 3.0 header I have on my motherboard so now I have two additional ports that don't do anything. Not a huge deal, I just tucked the cables away inside the 5.25" bay area underneath and my case has a front door covering the 5.25" bays anyway to hide it but I'm a little OCD about having non-functional ports on my computer.And speaking of the door on my case, that brings me to another plus: Unlike other 5.25" docks of this type it doesn't have any large locks, buttons or finger-handles that stick out of the face so I can actually shut the front door on my Corsair Obsidian 550D perfectly fine, this was a big worry of mine as I was looking and I'm glad I happened to come across this particular drive, it even matches everything else when the door is open. I highly recommend using the supplied screws to mount it, especially if your case has iffy tool-less mounts or even if it has a decent tool-less mount but only on one side like mine. This isn't like an optical drive where it just needs something in the screw holes to hold it still; you're gonna be exerting a bit of pressure on this as you push drives into it, the last thing you need is one of these suddenly shooting backwards into your case, especially with the weight of a 3.5" drive inside it. In addition, it has its own shock dampening system too so keeping everything tightly mounted is optimal for noise control.Overall this is a very useful addition to my computer, it should definitely help me out with backing up drives or dealing with problem drives for computer sidejobs

This is a nice space saver when you have a short chassis. Lian Li makes great solid enclosures for ATX boards but to get the space for the internal drives, power supply, and motherboard they sacrificed external cutouts. This trayless device lets you have cold storage for backups so that you can just push a drive in, do your backup, and then extract the drive. It has a nice feature of an on/off switch so that you can leave the drive in and turn it off so that your cold storage is still in the system but not powered on.One interesting thing about this enclosure is that to cram both a 2.5 inch trayless and 3.5 inch trayless into the space of a 5.25 bay they had to use a connector on the tray that isn't a true female SATA connector. It is a SATA connector with the top plastic part of the connector removed. As a result, when you insert the drive, the SATA contacts mate through pressure from the bottom without any way to mate with the connector on the top or to maintain a tight connection with drives that are thin. So far, Hitachi, Seagate, and WD 3.5 inch drives all follow a standard thickness and mate perfectly. But 2.5 inch drives vary in thickness and I found that my Corsair SSD is too thin and so doesn't maintain a tight enough connection to be reliable. A Samsung SSD is a little thicker and works just fine. A HGST mechanical drive that I pulled from a laptop is too thin to maintain a connection.The locking mechanism is very solid and it is spring loaded so it is easy to get drives out. The front LEDs are dual color so they change color when the drive is being accessed. The USB3 passthrough works as expected.I took one star off due to the way the drives connect unreliably without a true female connector for the drive. The enclosure is fully open from the top and I don't see any reason that a full female connector wouldn't have worked in the enclosure.